TINA SOTIS FINE ART PAINTINGS IN OIL

Tina Sotis HOME some evening singing.jpg

BUY 2012 CALENDAR

2012 Calendars Now Available!

11" x 17" on high quality, heavy paper stock, spiral bound on top. Each month displays a different painting.

$15 each plus $5 shipping. Please use the 'Buy Now" button below to order. NOTE: To use your credit card instead of paypal, click on the button below and follow the easy instructions.

(Apologies: The "Buy Now" button in this website program allows you to order only one calendar at a time.)

For orders of 3 or more please email me at tinasotis_gmail.com.

2012 CALENDAR PAGES

COVER
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
Mar.jpg
APRIL
MAY
JUNE
JULY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER

COVER
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
Mar.jpg
APRIL
MAY
JUNE
JULY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER

PORTFOLIO OF PAINTINGS

Isla de las Tortugas
MOON OVER ELTON'S FIELD
Sea Change
CLARITY
The Little Prince
I Am Free
Ode to Joy
SOME EVENING SINGING
THE LONG WAY
THE WAY THROUGH
THE TIES THAT BIND US
RAPTURE
RAPTURE II

Isla de las Tortugas
MOON OVER ELTON'S FIELD
Sea Change
CLARITY
The Little Prince
I Am Free
Ode to Joy
SOME EVENING SINGING
THE LONG WAY
THE WAY THROUGH
THE TIES THAT BIND US
RAPTURE
RAPTURE II

BIO

Artist Statement

My work is about transformation and is based on my own growth, experiences and inner life. It is about my view of how vast, mysterious and wonderful the world is - and no matter how small and alone we may seem, there is still a freedom, power and wonder in solitude. Much of my imagery is based on my love of wild things and I use animals as witnesses or mirrors of human behavior and what lies beneath the surface in all of us. This year I have discovered a love of scuba diving and the undersea world, and I am currently in the process of creating works that relate to my experiences there. Whatever the focus of the subject matter, I use light and space to lend tension and drama, creating a sense that something is about to unfold. Using metaphors for a human presence to offer a sense of scale and to lend an atmosphere of solitude and introspection, I allow the viewer to enter the paintings without distraction. Although I have some formal education in painting techniques (i.e. the use of the materials, color and spatial relationships), my conceptual approach comes from within. Originally from the lower Hudson River Valley I moved to Phoenix, AZ in my late 20's and lived there for approximately 10 years. I now live in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, a small town nestled in the Berkshire Mountains.
CONTACT

EXHIBITIONS No Frame

SELECTED PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS

August 2007 "New Work" Lauren Clark Fine Art, Housatonic, MA August 2006"Lifting the Veil"Two-person Exhibition - Fenn Gallery, Woodbury, CTFebruary 2005Two-person Exhibition - Chemers Gallery, Tustin, CAJuly 2004"Secrets Cast Long Shadows", Tokonoma Gallery, Housatonic, MA September 2003"Recent Paintings", Sandisfield Arts Center, Sandisfield, MAOctober 2001"New Paintings", Salisbury Town Hall, Salisbury, CTJuly 2001"The Solitary Muse", Tokonoma Gallery, Housatonic, MANovember 2000"The Waiting Room", Brewhouse Gallery, Grantham, Lincolnshire, UKOctober 1998White Creek Gallery, Salem, NYJanuary 1996"Solitude and Introspection", Karen Casey Gallery, Phoenix, AZ
REVIEWS Review of November exhibit by Shiela Weller,from The Sandisfield Times, November, 2011 IssueA Long and Lyrical Journey, by Land and Sea:The Paintings of Tina Sotis"All three boats are me: struggling, sinking, and at last, saving myself," artist Tina Sotis, says of the three very different vessels pitching wildly in a storm, in her lyrical, emotional, aquatic work The Way Through. "The way through," she continues, "is the only way to become the person you were born to be. I used to paint houses-- cubed, orderly structures -- all the time because they `contained' me," she continues." I was too afraid to let the world see me as who I was. But I have been through such transformation in the past several years..."That whole dazzling, thoughtful transformartion --the arc of Tina's quest -- is captured in her lush, distinctive paintings, on view at the Sandisfield Arts Center, at the intersection of Route 57 and Hammertown Road, from Saturday, November 5 through December 11. They are very much worth the visit. As fellow painter Lisabette Brinkman remarked, of Tina's work: "Each piece [is] a mysterious beauty." (Brinkman knows about mystery and beauty. She lives in a villa in Italy and is the daughter of raven-haired '50s screen actress Jeanne Crain). Fellow Sandisfield painter Sandy Parisky provides this assessment: "I really admire Tina's work. She's an accomplished painter able to create dream-like images that are full of mood and mystery; they're haunting and beautifully provocative. Distinguished folk artist Larry Zingale, who recently had an Arts Center show and has had six one-man shows in New York, calls Sotis's work full of purity andpower. And another Sandisfield painter, Susie Crofut, praises Sotis's unfailing use of color and soft brush strokes to present images from her extraordinary imagination, which both soothe and evoke.Tina's paintings are faintly reminiscent of Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Georgia O'Keefe, and Man Ray -- but, mostly, they are uniquely hers. For the last several years she has produced beautiful wall calendars, and I use mine to mark the months in my own Sandisfield home. I particularly love the surreal image for September 2010: a headless, armless mannequin in a pink gown fluttering over the dramatically black and white tiled floor of an empty suite of rooms. The image -- which is one of the paintings in her show -- has that pause-inducing Tina Sotis landmark: a confounding mix of moods. There's a curious insouciance in that mannequin, despite the noir environs (and her decapitated state!) -- and it's that very question-begging quality (happy or sad? ominous or tranquil?) -- that marks so many of the other paintings in her show as well.Tina Sotis, who has shown in galleries internationally, as well as in California, Oregon,Arizona, Florida and Connecticut, has lived in her woodsy home on Stump Road here inSandisfield for the past 12 years, but plans to move somewhere close to the sea to live out her new passion. The paintings in her show run the gamut of that quest. There are those "orderly, cubed" houses suffused with the feel of the Southern Berkshires. I particularly love the two neat pink barns on golden grass under a startlingly pale sky in Ode to Joy and the low-to-the-grass, delicately panicked birds in Turbulence at the Boundaries. As well: the solemn white Adirondack chairs on grass surrounded by trees -- one, notably spectral and demonic tree -- in her Some Evening Singing. Rustic pastoral life is full of discordant emotions and dark, sharp longing -- stasis and stillness that are rippling with about-to-burst disquietude: this is what these paintings seem to be saying. Never more so than in Clarity -- now, there's your shades of Wyeth! -- in which a shirt-sleeved young man seems about to hurl himself over a wide field under a giant sky. And in The Little Prince, in which a lonely fold-up table is a stand-in for a lonely person, set apart from an empty house so hugged and braced by clutching trees, you feel a hurricane coming on -- you feel the house is a human, endangered by some epic force.The paintings of the "other side" she's come out into -- her love of and life in the sea -- are also beautiful. In Sea Change a white heron sits atop a Sandisfieldian tree pointing to, perhaps, where she's ended up: the shore. In Isle De Las Tortugas, the same white bird is framed by a Mediterranean window right on the sea; in The Long Way, one of her "three boats that are me" is a lone craft bumping across the ocean. The existential course of our yearning lives.You will come away from the show enchanted, enriched -- and seconding the painter's -- and these paintings' -- belief in the integrity of following dreams, in plumbing our unconscious for signs of what to do next. Also -- if this isn't too much of a stretch: Tina Sotis's paintings feel..well, very Sandisfield. Even if she's left this huge, under-peopled town of ours -- with its massive swath of forest; its few long bumpy roads, its dozens of species of four legged creatures living in their hidden alternate universe within the depths of our million trees -- the evocative oddness of our town -- its elegance, solitude, and difficulty -- affected her daily life and her nocturnal journeys and seems to have imspired these painted visions. And now that her new life is taking her under the ocean -- swimming with dolphins! hunting for coral! -- her breathtaking recording of primal dreams is bound to get even more witty, surprising, and bountiful.

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BUY 2012 CALENDAR

2012 CALENDAR PAGES

PORTFOLIO OF PAINTINGS

BIO

CONTACT

EXHIBITIONS

REVIEWS

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